Every month, Dark Horse Comics gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a comic or book in the Horsepower column which appears in each of our printed comics issues for the month. These articles can include the inspiration behind a specific title, what it’s like to work in the comics industry, or some other special feature on the highlighted title of the month. In this month’s Horsepower, Jonathan Hickman, Nick Spencer, Mike del Mundo, and Mike Huddleston introduce readers to Three Worlds / Three Moons and their first release, Foundations:
There’s nothing like witnessing an act of inspiration, a moment of creation, to remind us we’re alive.
For the last several years, at 3w3m.com, we’ve been engaging in an experiment.
Traditionally, world-building was something creators did one of two ways: the first being in seclusion, whittling away at their desks, filling notebooks full of details before settling on a story, and using that story as the means to deliver that already-constructed world to the audience.
The other way is to use the story itself as a sort of fungible document, building the world through its pages concurrently, adding detail as it demands.
There are pluses and minuses to both approaches, but we wanted to invert them entirely.
What if we took the world-as-precursor-to-story approach and married it to the make-it-up-as-you-go delivery method?
What if we let the audience in as we built a new universe from the ground up—starting from a kernel of an idea and expanding outward from there, letting them see the trial and error, eliciting their feedback, and growing a community around the act of creation itself?
So, that’s what we did. The results have been pretty exhilarating. The books coming your way over the next year are the direct outcome of that experiment. Our intention for this initial wave of titles is to catch you up to all that we’ve developed there so far, because we want as many people to be a part of this as possible. We’re thrilled to partner with Dark Horse to make these works available via your favorite comic book retailer or bookstore.
What began with a few disparate ideas grew, in front of thousands of witnesses and participants, into a sprawling, richly realized new universe. We have hundreds of pages’ worth of lore, backstories, maps, and concept art, packaged beautifully into deluxe graphic novel sourcebooks, taking those formative notions and developing them into short stories featuring some of the brightest artistic talents in comics.
We have trial efforts in form and format itself, taking a digital micro-story and repurposing it as a tribute to the sci-fi serials of yesteryear’s golden age. We invited some of our favorite creative teams to take our ideas and run with them. We have invitations for you to step broadly into the new universe yourself while being given a guided tour of all its rich settings.
And from all of it, the beginnings of the story to come. In Foundations, the adventure of Tajo Vallar begins. In a solar system trapped in warring cycles of order and chaos, magic and science, his doomed mission to a dead moon—and what happens to the family he left behind—sets the stage for the grand conflict to come.
This is where everything starts. Let’s see where it goes now.
Together.
—Jonathan Hickman, Nick Spencer, Mike del Mundo, and Mike Huddleston
Foundations, written by Hickman and Spencer, and illustrated by del Mundo and Huddleston, is now available wherever comics are sold!
